Days One/Two

Willkommen!

Oh No! The shuttle van is on time! Quick, grab the bags!

We were at the airport two hours before the flight - the benefit of which was being able to talk ourselves into bulkhead seats for the flight to Chicago. So far so good.

Except that American Airlines has done some sort of deal with CBS, so you're subjected to CBS programming - old 60 Minutes excerpts, sitcoms, etc. - most every minute the movie isn't showing. We have our own little 5-inch display stuck on the bulkhead in front of us - we're at FL 370 and we still can't escape Dan Rather's wattles. Thanks, but right now I'd rather watch the window shade.

Five hours later we stand up, wander into the terminal at O'Hare, and rub our flattened backsides. While we're sitting at the gate waiting for the next plane, we watch a teenage girl a few seats away leave all her bags and wander off to do some shopping. Twenty minutes later she finally returned, just as we were about to conclude that her bags contained fifty pounds of Semtex and a timer and that she was probably getting away as fast as she could. At any rate, the bunch of us pile on to the next plane for another boring, uneventful eight hours of tailbone reshaping.

Frankfurt-am-Main Airport is not a Flughafen; it's more like a Flugstadt. It goes on for miles - excuse me, kilometers. Just the new construction alone would dwarf most airports.

The Eschenheimer Turm - the largest and, apparently, most picturesque of the remaining watchtowers of the old walled city of Frankfurt.

As we pile through Customs (a non-event) and dump our bags in a heap in the terminal, we realize that we have the hotel's email reply to our reservation - but not their address or phone number. Inquiring at the money-changing booth reveals that (a) the girl there speaks much better English than I do German, and (b) the ATM and information desk are in the next terminal. We collect our bags, pile through the doors into the next concourse, and dump them again. The clerk at the information booth looks up the hotel and writes down the address and phone. We pick up the bags and pile down into S-Bahn station. The guy at the Deutsche Bahn information desk maps out a route for us to the hotel. Hey, I think, this isn't going to be so bad after all. - as Eva not so gently points out that I'm heading for the wrong train.

First impressions...downtown Frankfurt is a little grubby. It looks like most things that could be tagged have been tagged. Nonetheless, the S-Bahn and the (sweltering hot) U-Bahn get us from the airport to within four blocks of our hotel on the fringes of downtown in 15 min on a Saturday morning. I dare you to try this via public transit pretty much anywhere in the US.

Out on the Eschenheimer Landstrasse, a few blocks down the road from the Eschenheimer Turm the Turm Hotel awaits. We check in uneventfully and head for the elevator - a chummy three-passenger size. The room is bright and recently renovated, though not large. There's a bed in the middle, and it's just about one AM back home but we've got to stay awake, got to adjust, got to keep moving. What to do now? We head out just to wander around a little and end up at the Frankfurt Zoo. The Zoo has a few sharp exhibits (the nocturnal animals exhibit - posted with Watch for pickpockets signs - is impressive) but a few that showed signs of overdue maintenance.

A couple hours later, we catch a tram toward downtown and walk endlessly looking for food. We pass pizza place after pizza place, but Eva's in Germany and she's going to find something resembling German food. In my first real test at interpreting German menus, I fail completely. In desperation, she comes to a halt in front of a Döner Kebab stand and tells me to order. I do, and the guy begins shaving lamb onto a bed of lettuce in pita bread. I duck next door and order hähnchen süss/sauer - yes, that's right, sweet/sour chicken. The kebab proves to be very good - a good bit better than the chicken.

By now we're both exhausted, but (continuing with our motif of excessive and unnecessary planning ahead) we head over to the Hauptbahnhof to buy tomorrow's train ticket. It's somewhat comical to watch nicotine-starved Germans pouring up out of the S-Bahn (which is at least nominally non-smoking) frantically lighting up as they enter the train station - greeted by a huge lighted Marlboro Man statue at the top of the escalator.

The line at the DB service desk is long and not nearly so orderly as all the stories about Germans would have you believe. I'm too tired to deal with it for now so we give up and return to the hotel. I'd just as soon pass out for the night, but Eva won't hear of it - we have to go for dinner. So a nap will have to suffice - at which point I discover these huge, down-filled German pillows. Mein Gott, these things are magnificent.

A little later we go for a walk to reconnoiter restaurants in the area. To the east the Eschenheimer Landstrasse leads out into a pleasant mixed residential/business area. As we hike along, we pass absolutely nothing but Italian restaurants - pizzerias, trattorias, the whole nine yards. Looping back down through the business district to the hotel, there's one Japanese place. Meanwhile, I'm observing the driving environment: the pace is more leisurely than expected. Slower and less hectic than in the UK in '95, and pedestrians do not seem to be regarded primarily as targets.

We return to the hotel, call DB for tomorrow's train schedules, and head back out to a local trattoria for dinner. The staff's English was middling-decent (funny how so many Germans, when faced with a guy wearing a Buttonwillow Raceway Park polo shirt and speaking ragged German, will just shift gears into English automatically), the food was good, and a couple hours and DM46 later we were headed back to the hotel for the night. Of course, at this point the body clock still says it's 2PM and the idea of sleep is highly questionable.

Cars - yes, Mercedes cabs abound - virtually every cab you run across is an E200 or E230D. Lots of E Benzes/5er BMWs around though mostly the lower-end models we don't get in the US (520i/523i/525tds, E200/230) - most don't even have model badges and the odds are better than even that the pretty E-class Benz with the 17-inch wheels you just passed is in fact an E230.

Other notable hardware: the MGF is a sweet-looking product, lots of Fiat Barchettas around as well and a surprising number of old BMW Z1s. The most common US car around is the BMW Z3, and there's a fair number of Jeep Cherokees and Chrysler minivans around. The Euro-market versions are assembled at Steyr in Austria so it's hard to say they really count. I expected to see more Ford Explorers.

In the end, we did sleep, but some neighbors chatting over an early breakfast on a nearby balcony had us up before 5AM.